Escape Plan

Saw Escape Plan (Thanks John!) It was a fairly silly prison break film staring Sylvester Stallone as an escape-artist who gets incarcerated in various prisons and then pulls of elaborate escapes to show their security holes. One day he's sent to some kind of crypto-Guantanamo which is, like, the most secure prison ever. The inmates are kept in clear plastic cubes arranged in hexagonal patterns. The whole thing is ludicrous. Anyway he teams up with Arnold Schwarzenegger to bust out of this fortress.

On the outside, there's a cool blonde woman who is maybe Sylvester's girlfriend, maybe his ex? The film is kinda hazy on that point, but there's also a black tech-guy who they refer to as a "techno-thug" which seems a little demeaning. This techno-thug apparently spends his time assembling cubes out of little cubes on his computer. The ways of tech-thuggery are indeed mysterious. Unfortunately, we don't see very much of these two, focusing instead on Sylvester in prison.

The film is definitely not my cup of tea, but it's not outright terrible. There's many hilariously stupid Rube Goldberg machines constructed to help them escape, and more formalized macho pasturing than a wrestling contest but at least it was sort of coherent and well-shot. The antagonist is this interestingly dainty bureaucrat type who fidgets with his tie and collects butterflies. I liked the idea of a non-threatening book-keeper being the CEO of the prison colony, but instead we get him swanning about like Severus Snape, only with a higher-pitched voice. They pair him up with British heavy Vinnie Jones, but even so, they don't seem Guantanamo-level scary.

Speaking of, this is a privately owned prison in the film, holding international terrorists and baddies (who, it should be noted, are indistinguishable from generic prison-dudes in any other film.) It seems odd to me, if this prison is so badass, that they allow them to wander around, that they have a cafeteria. What about the black hoods and stress positions? There's some water-boarding I think, but I feel like this prison could have been way more dehumanizing. Then again, Sylvester may not have been able to get out of that situation, so I guess we have to swallow this.

Not a terrible film, but not a very good one.